Shift to sectarian killings feared in Iraq

[leftchick]

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/05/26/news/sect.php

No one knows who tortured and killed Hassan al-Nuaimi, a Sunni Arab cleric whose body was found in an empty lot this month, with a hole drilled in his head and both eyes missing. But the various theories have a distinctly sectarian tinge.

A Shiite police chief investigating the death said that he suspected Sunni Arab extremists who have driven much of the insurgency in Iraq, a lot of it aimed at Shiites. The Sunni family mourning the cleric pointed the finger at the Badr Organization, a Shiite militia. But with Nuaimi buried, the truth, as so often is the case with killings in Iraq, seemed lost in rumor and allegations.

The only sure thing was that Nuaimi, and another Sunni man who helped write sermons, were killed within 12 hours of their disappearance from a mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhood in northeast Baghdad. And their deaths, amid violence that has taken more than 550 lives across Iraq this month, renewed concern that the bloodshed might be shifting ever more toward crudely sectarian killings.

<snip>

But the urgency of the Shiite leaders' appeals reflects a deepening anxiety that the welter of allegations about Shiite death squads targeting Sunni Arabs, true or false, may prompt still more sectarian killings, pushing the country to the brink of civil war.

<snip>

"They let the genie out of the bottle," Atiyyah said.


"Who could have predicted"?... :banghead: